


I was hoping for Kenobi. Why are you here?

by CollisionTheory



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Crack Treated Seriously, Debate Team, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Fluff, Humor, Pong Krell hate, Star Wars Modern AU, Trader Joe's, malicious compliance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 01:40:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29394219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CollisionTheory/pseuds/CollisionTheory
Summary: Darth Maul and Ahsoka Tano are rivals on different debate teams in their senior year of high school in an AU where he works at her local Trader Joe's on Coruscant.
Relationships: Darth Maul/Ahsoka Tano
Comments: 16
Kudos: 34





	I was hoping for Kenobi. Why are you here?

**Author's Note:**

> This is dedicated to all my enablers in the Foxiyo server.

Maul pauses his work and stares at her, eyes traveling between her scowl and the schedule she’s holding out to him as his hand hovers limply above a shelf of Trader Joe’s pepita salsa.

He returns the scowl and pulls it out of her hands with a little more force than necessary, in the same motion smoothing out a Hawaiian shirt that’s unbuttoned just enough to hint at the risqué without bringing him to the negative attention of his shift leader again. He and Palpatine may both have been in their senior year, but positional authority was a hell of a thing.

Maul’s eyes flit across the paper she’d given him, finding his next scheduled match against her for their high school debate regional semi-finals. Her team hasn’t even lost once so far, but he does his best to look unimpressed when he looks up at her.

“Ahsoka Tano, is it?” he asks, piling boredom and annoyance into his voice, still bitter over his narrow loss to her what with college application resumés coming up. “I can’t say yours is a name familiar…”

Her raised eyebrows form disbelief and a rhetorical question as Maul stares back, trying to ignore how nicely the blue and white chevrons of her headscarf frame her face in the fluorescent light.

“Well _I_ know _you_.” Ahsoka makes an awkward attempt to cross her arms while she’s holding her shopping basket, and a box of ice cream sandwiches falls out.

She makes a small sound and puts a hand up to her chest as Maul hastily drops to his knees, purely because he works there and is contractually obligated to be helpful. 

“Yes,” he sticks his tongue in the pocket of his cheek, putting the ice cream sandwiches back in her basket, careful _not_ to place them next to the other frozen items she’s picked. “I imagine we have several mutual friends.”

Ahsoka shoves the box to the other side of the basket where her frozen pasta and mini pizzas are nestled.

“I wouldn’t put it that way.” She blinks at him more slowly than anyone has in his life and hopes that he has as much trouble finding parking in the store lot as she does. 

“Of course not…” He bends down to stack another jar of salsa without looking at it, putting it on the wrong shelf as he idly watches whatever’s happening at the dairy section. “I’m afraid your way of thinking is behind the times…” 

She almost rolls her eyes at the non sequitur. He acts like he’s still personally offended by her argumentation over the area’s decades-old farming policy, but she doesn’t get the chance to respond before he speaks again, stacking another jar of salsa on the wrong shelf.

“I was certain that Kenobi would have come himself to show me the schedule, perhaps bringing his loyal foal– Skywalker– is it?” He finally hands the paper back to her, like she didn’t already have a copy and hadn’t gone out of her way to bring the schedule to him after school.

“Our team captain had a more important engagement.” She plucks the paper from him and folds it up, tucking it into her purse beside her shopping list which she never sticks or refers to anyway.

“Indeed…” Maul looks back at the dairy section, compulsively worrying the next button on his shirt as he sees a couple holding hands by the yogurt. ““I… wonder…” He looks at Ahsoka again, and something rises in his chest.

He thinks of the two free movie tickets his manager had passed off to him with a friendly wink the last time Ahsoka had come in. _Brilliant, brilliant…_ He’d tucked them into his back pocket and forgotten about them until just now as he looked at his one-and-only debate team rival and number one contender for the Mandalore University scholarship. He hadn’t been privy to his manager’s plan, but now– now he saw it.

Maul takes a deep breath and looks into her eyes, feeling the pit of his stomach drop as he extends a tattooed arm to hold out a ticket towards her.

“Ahsoka…will you go see the 4K re-release of _Attack of the Clones_ with me?”

She opens her mouth a little, like she’s been frozen in carbonite for a moment then unfrozen just as quickly.

He feels frozen too as his flight-or-fight response jams, waiting for her reaction.

_The moment may be upon us…_

“Maul…” Ahsoka’s smile is odd, intrigued by something she can’t believe is happening. “Are you asking me out on a date?”

“Well, Ahsoka…” he enunciates her name, drawing it out under his breath to taste the syllables as he roles a jar of something that probably isn’t salsa at all this time in his hands. “Do you recall– was the defendant’s appeal rejected in _Grand Army of the Republic vs Krell_ last year _?_ ”

She releases a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding and adjusts the shopping basket in her hands, careful not to let anything fall out this time.

“So…when are you taking me out?” she asks, and her face broadens into a beaming, mischievous smile.


End file.
